Reparative justice campaigners rarely acknowledge Britain’s role in ending the slave trade in much of the world. They are silent on the Royal Navy’s role. They refuse to consider the centuries of enslavement of Africans by Arab traders, commemorated in Zanzibar.
By play-acting as if high immigration was an accident her party wandered into, Badenoch is guilty of admitting either her party’s deceit or incompetence. Neither of these implications is attractive to our exhausted electorate. British voters are desperate for concrete solutions to the problems that mass immigration has created.
After years knocking on the No.11 door demanding benefit treats, Burnham must now find a way to pay for them at the Budget. He will find little sympathy on the Conservative benches, which have adopted Onward’s plan to reset Local Housing Allowance to the 10th percentile and extend the caps to social housing
So, yes, of course we need to be mindful of disinformation campaigns from Russia and other states, especially given the centrality of its role in modern conflict. But we also need to be mindful of the lies peddled by our own government and other European leaders.
A pension exchange can help employers, shift mindsets around universal guarantees, and offer a carrot to workers. After all, no one enjoys seeing deductions on a pay cheque. But it’s easier to bear when you see those funds being put to work in your own account.
At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, Kemi laid out the clear dividing lines between us and Labour. They’ll always take more of people’s money; we want to let people keep what they earn. They’ll always think that the state has all the answers; we know that our country does best when people have more control over their own lives.
The lesson is clear: a little like the armed forces, you can survive in politics only as a team, not as individuals. Mercer and Francois, despite both having served in the Army, forgot this. The importance of discipline does, thankfully, appear to have been learned by the diminished remnants of the parliamentary party.
The challenge is not just for us individually to pass on an inheritance to our own children – admirable though that is. It is also for young people as a whole to have a chance of a good education and a good job which does not depend on who your parents are.
The importance of “The Right Way” is not simply that it tells voters what Conservatives believe, but that it establishes the principles against which future policy decisions can be judged. After years in which short-term political calculations too often displaced long-term strategy, that discipline matters.
Rebuilding support from affluent voters makes political sense. For it to succeed, however, greater emphasis on economic and fiscal credibility is needed which will require some political bravery on issues like the triple lock and EU relations. The party conference was a good start, but there is still a very long way to go.
As CPS Director Liam Halligan said in response to Badenoch’s speech, ‘Britain’s problems are urgent – but we changed course fifty years ago and, as the Tories under Badenoch now clearly understand, with the right ideas, we can do so again.’
The party that does so and speaks for the data analyst in Leeds as readily as the welder in Sheffield will have found the ground Labour has left behind. In doing so, we could speak for the jobs which most people do, and which contribute most to our economy.
We should not be asking the voters to bail us out. Instead, the parties on the right should be helping point the way. I want to see a “Kemistry” Government. But it is our duty first and foremost to protect the nation from that six-headed hydra.
Although there is no binding Act of Parliament to say so, most of us think that if Parliament wants to give away its powers to govern and to manage parts of the government to a superior power for a period longer than a UK Parliament, there should be a referendum.
Young Conservatives should be a pipeline for the next generation of councillors, campaigners, researchers and political leaders. Not because everyone joining a YC social secretly dreams of becoming Prime Minister (although I am sure a few do), but because every political party need people who turn ideas into electoral victory.